So to preface this overly long critique, the reason I'm putting this on here is both to warn any ttrpg players who are looking for a simulation of their old game; minus their drunken ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ friends yelling at the dm across the table because plasma fire turned their femur into a pipebomb. And to ask what the fans of this sort of thing might want, other than this if anything.

I played the the Fantasy Flight ttrpgs over a decade ago, though mostly we played Black Crusade. And understand that the systems were broken ♥♥♥♥, they even had sidebars telling you to discount or modify systems, Rogue Trader being the least well conceptualized of the bunch. We did ultimately create a totally balanced homebrew system which could play at any level from Inquisitorial stooges scrounging around an underhive to warlords of Chaos burning sectors to the ground, but that was five years of work, mostly mine as I am cursed to be the eternal DM. So I understand that Owlcat wasn't exactly working with gold here but most of the design decisions in this utterly baffle me. So here are my thoughts and correct them if there is something later in the game that changes them.

1)Though it at first appears to be cover based it really isn't. The originals were based on gunplay, pinning tests elicited by suppressing fire. The only variable being very powerful but very risky magic. This game however is based almost entirely around cycling buffs, is despise this kind of game design but that's just a personal preference. What I'm asking is would anybody else have felt that "ballistic chess" would have both fit the setting better, been more enjoyable, and been far easier to balance than the system as it exists. Maybe I'm just old but non-magical buffs and debuffs applied by everybody has always made me furious since it was implemented in 4e because to my mind it makes no sense,. Sure yell at a guy so he can reroll his pinning test, or a fear test, or have 5% better aim but its kind of ridiculous when taken to the extremes here and is almost impossible to balance as the devs no doubt now realize.

2) The fights are not particularly hard on "unfair" difficultly even going in blind but they are mostly gimmick fights, which is very strange to me as most of the variety in this sort of wargame comes not from unique environmental puzzles or effects but the composition of the enemy forces. Once again this might just be me but merely changing the enemies in slow escalation would have been easier. Once again this might be my personal hatred of mechanics which are not logical at a glance, for example, "why does a mental gaze attack set off explosive barrels?", they even described how the Navigator Eye works in text so they obviously knew. The constant buffing combined with the gimmicks just really, really bore me to death.

3) The in game economy makes no sense, you shouldn't even have a loot system that you care about other than very elite gear you pilfer off of rivals. I just completely breaks it for me when you are hording lasguns when actual Rogue Traders ship the things by the thousands of metric tons. How are frag or krak nades hard to come by for somebody who owns a private vessel? Maybe they should have implemented limited ammo, giving you a reason to scrounge las packs off the dead, while with more powerful weapons like bolters and plasma rifles you're ♥♥♥♥ out of luck. This is even a joke in Dark Heresy, "do you want bolter shells or to eat for the next six months? For Rogue Traders and their lackeys the cost isn't an issue because they can manufacture them on ship, but my point is that it would have been about securing vast quantities of resources combined with very rare loot like say a millennia old plasma pistol you steal of a cult leader. The latter happens to an extent but from my understanding the escalation is such that the loot and shopping aspects of the original concept just vanish.

4) I only got a taste of power scaling but from my understanding it is really nuts, and it kinda makes balancing combat impossible, which to my mind defeats the entire point of a very crunchy and supposedly deadly system.

5) I'm not going to complain about Planetary Management or void combat because unless you have access to the homebrews of dozens of groups of hyper-nerds who independently tried to fix a utterly broken original pen and paper system you're going to have to just do your own thing.

6) The story seems fairly generic, not good not bad, I could see the softball pitch of "it's a Lord of Change you dumbass" from a mile away, assuming that is correct but that's only for people who are obsessive deebs and read codexes for decades. For those going into the setting blind weird ♥♥♥♥ inherent to the setting could be presented quite compellingly here.

7) I see some distinguishing features here, like lingering wounds obviously inspired by the infamous critical hit tables, and giving everybody what are effectively Fate Points to cheat death so long as the party wins the engagement. But I don't know if I like the implementation or not.

8) I'm not a fan of the action economy system but since this diverges so far from the table top I'm not sure the old system would fit any better. So that's pretty neutral.

So in summary do you guys prefer this synergy focused buff-fest where the emphasis is on builds, or would you prefer a more "tactical" style of gameplay focused on gear and much weaker but maybe more impactful leveling because the power creep doesn't really exist? Or am I just an old man yelling at clouds? Is this just Owlcat's style and I should have looked that their games for expectations rather than the title. Would Owlcat break out of this mould if there had been feedback in that direction? And yes I don't preview things because I don't want to ruin surprises, sue me.